LineHive: A Timeline Creation Tool

LineHive allows you to create timelines from internet content.

The technology (or what are my powers?)

You can register for a free LineHive account which allows you to create your own timelines. Select any one of the “create” options to get started.

Add urls to articles you want to highlight in your timeline. The catch is that there’s a rather small limit to the number of urls you can add (3-6).

As you insert urls to articles, LineHive will save them to the timeline, making its best guess as to the date—typically when the article in question was written. This isn’t always the date you want viewers to note (e.g., the article may not have been written on the event date), but you have the option to edit this. Clicking on the date field displays a calendar which you can use to identify the appropriate date.

Similarly, LineHive will guess at the caption you want added, adding titles in many cases. You can  edit or expand on this field. You also can change the images selected from the article or add a url to a different image.

Add a caption (a title and brief description) and save your timeline or publish it.

The url for this particular timeline is here: Serious games for health evolve.

All of your timelines will be saved on your profile page.

The LineHive JetPack
If you use Firefox as your browser, you can  install the  LineHive JetPack for additional functionality. This tool will alert you as you browse the web if there’s a timeline associated with a particular article. You also can use the LineHive JetPack to quickly create new timelines or to add articles to an existing timeline you’re working on as described here.

Instructional strategies

There are other interactive timeline tools out there, but LineHive is both extremely easy to use from a technical standpoint and very challenging from a problem-solving standpoint. Asking learners to pick 3-6 pivotal events surrounding a moment in history can create a great deal of interesting discussion. (You might want to keep those moments in history quite narrow in terms of time periods and create multiple timelines to show progressions or trends.) Use LineHive’s sharing tools to share your learners’ views of the events that define a historical period and link these or embed these on a web page with a discussion forum/chat box to create a richer learning experience.

Additional timeline resources

3 responses to “LineHive: A Timeline Creation Tool

  1. Pingback: Gerrys Blog » Blog Archive » Cammy | Cammy Bean’s Learning Visions: Clark Quinn on Designing Mobile

  2. Thank you for posting this information. I have subscribed to your RSS feed and look forward to continued excellence in posting.

    As someone who personally struggles with remembering dates, I can see this being a very useful tool for instruction. If students can associate several key events with the appropriate dates around the date that is trying to be learned, they may be more likely to encode the information and process it into long-term memory. Additionally, it can be difficult for some students (especially younger learners) to grasp the concept that event do not take place by themselves. Helping the student to see that other events occurred at or near the same time can lead them to realize that time continues to go forward and events are happening all over at the same time. The world is a much bigger place than they seem to think much of the time.
    -jeff

  3. Pingback: Create a digital, time-centered story with iJourney | Instructional Design Fusions

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